Quick, Quirky Fact

The first webcam ever watched a coffee pot.

In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge in England were tired of making trips to the communal coffee pot in the Trojan Room of their computer lab—only to find it empty. To solve the problem, a group of computer scientists came up with an ingenious solution.

Here’s how it worked:

• They set up a camera pointing at the coffee pot.

• The camera was connected to the internal network and the image updated about once per second.

• It displayed a 128x128-pixel grayscale image, which was perfectly fine for answering the only question that mattered: “Is there coffee?”

What happened next?

• In 1993, the video feed was made available on the World Wide Web, becoming the first webcam ever viewable online.

• The Trojan Room coffee pot quickly became a quirky symbol of early internet culture, drawing millions of curious viewers over the years.

• When, in 2001, the camera was finally shut down, the actual coffee pot was sold on eBay for £3,350 (over $4,000 at the time).

So, the very first webcam wasn’t about security or communication. It was about caffeine cravings. It marked the beginning of webcam technology as we know it today.